I HAVE heard it said that Princess Margaret was the Princess Diana of her day. She wasn’t.

While they both shared a wilful independence and indiscreet love lives, Margaret was the Queen’s sister and embedded in the Royal Family.

Her blood ties and respect for Elizabeth meant she would protect her older sister by any means.

Richard Stirling’s astute chamber play captures Margaret’s duality as she contemplates destroying compromising correspondence discovered in the Queen Mother’s apartments in Clarence House in 1993.

Margaret (Felicity Dean) is assisted by the Queen Mother’s waspish steward William (Richard Stirling) and she smokes and drinks copiously while railing at interlopers like Princess Michael whom she dubs “Rent-A-Kent” and Diana: “She’s the only one I’m really scared of.” Then compromising photographs of her with gangster John Bindon (Patrick Toomey) are brought to her and the stage is set for an invented encounter with Bindon.